Crowdsourcing Project Helps Protect Global Food Supply
In an effort to improve the global food supply chain, SAP SE, London, announced initiatives that use Big Data to help better understand the planet's diversity and enhance food safety. The initiatives intend to use the SAP HANA platform to collect and analyze data to help crowdsource the identification and analysis of species globally as well as identify fraud in the global food supply.
The International Barcode of Life (iBOL) project involves a consortium of institutions built into a database containing DNA barcodes for every species on the planet. The database currently hosts more than 400,000 species. However, to identify all the species on the planet, estimated at anywhere between 10-100 million, the iBOL project is looking to expand the number of people contributing to the research.